Football Violence, in Italy and Everywhere

There’s a lot we still don’t know about the death of Gabriele Sandri, and a lot we probably never will know. Journalists and bloggers have been diligent in their search for the truth, but the truth in this case is going to be buried by political interests and by the larger interests of football. Whatever conclusion the police inquiry reaches, there is already a sense that it will reflect a political assessment: how can stability be restored without blame being attached to anyone with any real power? There is widespread concern that the police will protect the officer who shot Sandri regardless of the facts, but what seems far more likely is that they will sacrifice the officer who shot Sandri in order to placate the mob and keep the blame from flowing upward. Yesterday the killing was portrayed as an accident; today the police are describing it as manslaughter, with “a possibility that the categorization of the crime…could change for the worse.” I have no knowledge of what happened at that gas station, but the simple fact that the chief of Italian police has had to promise that there will be no cover-up attests to the lack of trust in authority that many have blamed for yesterday’s outbreak of violence.

Online and in the papers, this crisis has been as well-covered as the circumstances will allow, and bloggers at The Offside, Spangly Princess and Pitch Invasion deserve enormous credit for collecting all the strands of this rapidly changing story in one place. But what I want to look at is our attraction to the crisis itself. What is it about football violence that we find so irresistibly fascinating? As ready as we are to condemn it, don’t we seem to be drawn to it in a way we seldom discuss? Why is it that fans who would never participate in violent behavior themselves still feel their hearts beat a little faster when they see a story about brawls outside a stadium? Why do so many people seem to take a voyeurish delight in documentaries about hooliganism and Heysel? We deplore this sort of thing in every conceivable way, and yet, in one of those parts of ourselves that we listen to but don’t talk about, we seem to find it strangely exciting.

I’ve made the case before that one of the reasons we’re attracted to sports is that it provides with a safe outlet for some of the violent impulses that civilization requires us to repress. It lets us experience the thrill of conflict without having to risk the consequences. That’s one of the useful functions of football, arguably, but it also means that there’s something uncivilized, something primitive or primal, running under the surface of our involvement with it. It’s this that FIFA is keen to disguise with its slogans about friendship and its endless children and doves. What fascinates us about violence, I think, is that it seems to lift the cover off our preoccupation with sports and show us the underground truth. Hooligans with switchblades give an extreme and actual expression to a feeling that for most of us is moderate and virtual. And so, if we let ourselves, we can begin to see a kind of twisted authenticity in a crowd of men throwing rocks at the police.

But when we go that far, I think, we’re making a mistake. (And most of us evidently know this, since few of us would ever admit how easy it would be to go that far.) I think the lead-pipe wielders are caught in exactly the same error as the FIFA stuffed-animal brigade, only they make it in the opposite direction. The thrill of sports is not simply in making contact with a repressed dark side of ourselves, but in feeling that current in ourselves transformed by the game into something creative and celebratory. That can’t happen if we pretend that football is all goodness and light. But it can’t happen if we pretend that it’s all trench warfare, either.

Football Violence, in Italy and Everywhere

It’s a very interesting question. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily have much to do with football itself; people deplore the mafia, yet everyone is happy to admit the thrill of watching The Godfather or The Sopranos. And even reading about or actually coming across real-life gangsters.

The difference with football, I suppose, it’s that there’s now a global problem of violence associated with it in most places, unfortunately.

A concern I have as a result is that ultras everywhere are now being tarred with the same hooligan brush football fans in England had to put up with in the 80s — which led to tragedy. Most ultras are not, in fact, violent.

I came over here from Spangly Princess’s site, and this is a very fine blog. Congratulations.

This is the Norbert Elias theory of sport as part of the civilising process, isn’t it? Elias suggests that sport does function exactly as you suggest in providing a forum for the contained and ritualised expression of what you and he call ‘primitive’ forces (though that’s a word I prefer to avoid) but that it doesn’t and can’t do that in isolation. When other things are going on, socially and politically, sport can be turned around to provide a focus around which to act out grievances, grievances which may not be fully grasped and certainly can’t be articulated by the people experiencing them.

If Elias and his successors are broadly right, this problem can’t be resolved with repressive measures, only suppressed. It is political.

Because football, in particular, soaks up the need for adrenalin and excitement in an explicitly tribal setting (offering the deep pleasures of solidarity and belonging in a fractured society), the risk when things go wrong is great; it’s a bit like nuclear power, a fantastic solution with awful disaster potential.

Let’s not forget that mostly, it works. My eleven-year-old acts very like Feyanoord Kid at an Arsenal match and is a mild, principled lad the rest of the time. Our lives – his and mine – would be less rich without our tribal identity. And he treasures the CSKA scarf he got through a swap after a Champions League match last year, which suggests that the fluffy bunny, kids-and-universal-fellowship model is also operating, simultaneously, in a very complex figuration.

Thanks again for your excellent work, I shall be visiting regularly in future.

@Tom – Very fair point about most ultras not being violent. I’ve changed the line about “ultras with switchblades” to “hooligans with switchblades” in the post just to avoid further clouding this point. As for mob movies (or war films, westerns, action movies, etc.), I’d say yes, this is a phenomenon that extends far beyond football and certainly is something that occurs in our experience of particular kinds of art. One difference in football, as you say, is that compared to movies or books, it seems to exist right on the threshold where the substitute for violence turns into actual violence. It’s been a while since a ballet caused a riot (although it has happened!)

@de vertalerin – Thanks for bringing my attention to Norbert Elias. I hadn’t read his work, but will do so now with interest. Based on a cursory Google search, my impression is that his (serious, scholarly) interest is in the function of sports within the larger order of society, whereas my (amateur, half-formed) interest is in the fan’s experience of sports and the way a visceral attraction to conflict can be transformed into something aesthetic. But I agree with what you’ve written here, and was really interested to read about your son. It’s striking how often children seem to have a perfect intuitive sense of the stakes of being a fan–they throw themselves into the games with serious passion, but don’t let game reality distort their everyday behavior.

Brian, in The Quest for Excitement in Leisure, which is published in Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process Elias and Dunning relate their thesis to drama and other types of performance before turning to the specific example of football, so there may be something there than links in to your interests – they discuss the relationship between aesthetics and catharsis.

Did you see Spangles’ blog entry in which she quotes an ultra’s description of the fan experience? It aroused an unusually heated debate.

Quest for Excitement is on tap for my next library visit. I’m really looking foward to reading it.

I did see the Spangly Princess blog post, though I had missed the debate in the comments section. I’ve added my own long-winded comment asking whether the self-presentation of the ultra subculture and its embrace of extreme positions don’t qualify as implicit endorsements of violence. I didn’t even get to the question of the ultras and the civilizing process, but will continue to think about it for long-winded comments in the future.

I wonder if some of these violent episodes stem from the fact that the football games people played before rules were formalized were much more violent than the games played today. If you do a search for mob football or Shrovetide football, you’ll find out that there was nothing “fluffy bunny” about the football played in towns in the middle ages. Back in those days, the only real penalty during a game was manslaughter.

The violence inherent in mob football was repressed when the world accepted Association football as its football game of choice. If Association football were a rougher game, I’m not sure this would be as big an issue.